27 June 2012

Judicial Decisionmaking, With a Twist

While judicial decisionmaking studies are standard fare in the ELS world, a recent paper by Laarni Escresa (Hamburg & Bologna) and Nuno Garoupa (Ill.), Judicial Politics in Unstable Democracies: The Case of the Philippine Supreme Court, an Empirical Analysis 1986-2010, adds a novel and interesting wrinkle. Specifically, the paper, forthcoming at 3 Asian Journal of Law and Economics (2012), applies standard models to judicial decisions from a foreign (Philippines) unstable democracy. The abstract follows.

"In this paper we investigate empirically the determinants of judicial behavior at the Philippine Supreme Court in the period 1986-2010. Our results show an important alignment between individual Justices and the interests of the presidential appointers, although it varies across presidential terms. We discuss these empirical results in the context of the Philippine unstable democracy and the implications for the comparative literature on judicial behavior."